midnight ukulele disco

Once again I've sat at the screen and said out loud 'this is why I love the internet!'.

You need a bit of broadband time and your speakers on for Midnight Ukulele Disco, but oh sweet Christ on a unicycle how it's worth it.

The site is, as the name semi-implies, a repository of video clips of songs performed on ukulele. Hundreds of them.

It appears to be a low-budget US TV show where people send in clips of themselves doing songs on ukulele. Utter fucking genius. There is, as you'd expect, some folky tunes like Dirty Old Town. But there's a lot more besides. The very first thing they posted was Wild Thing!

I'm a sucker for an incongrous cover version, and whilst I'm spoilt for choice at Midnight Ukulele Disco, I have to say the ones that really wet my whistle and tickled my fancy were Turning Japanese, Live To Tell, the great group performance of My Best Friend's Girl, and a different ensemble doing an instrumental version of Staying Alive that's already my second favourite cover of the song, better still than the one by Dweezil Zappa and Donny Osmond. (My favourite, by quite some distance, is the flat-out grindcore version by a band who not only do the best cover of Staying Alive but also have one of the best band names ever, Anal Cunt).

However, back on Midnight Ukulele Disco, all the above mentioned toweringly magnificent ukulelistic efforts are themselves dwarved by the stunning halfway-to-a-proper-video thing of a serious rock dude doing Enter Sandman, complete with distortion pedal, Fender amp and, if I'm seeing it right, an Ovation ukulele!

Off to never-never land indeed.